Metaphysics Of The Men’s Room

Charles Krauthammer comments on Donald Trump’s apathy toward North Carolina’s new LGBT laws on transgender people using restrooms. Krauthammer is puzzled by the need for the law and asked, “do we really have an epidemic of transgenders being evil in bathrooms?”

Krauthammer said the law is a “solution in search of an issue” and said transgenders using public bathrooms has become a problem “precisely because Republicans in North Carolina decided it was a problem.”

“It is not a major national problem and it should have been left that way,” Krauthammer said.

I’m sure Krauthammer is being sincere, but I think he’s in way over his head here. In one sense, yes, transgender access to bathrooms is not a “major national problem” — but the activist left and their supporters in corporate America and the Democratic Party are turning it into one.

In our stores, we demonstrate our commitment to an inclusive experience in many ways. Most relevant for the conversations currently underway, we welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.

Hey, it’s a private company, it’s their right to run their bathrooms as they please. I don’t begrudge them that. But note that Target is trumpeting this to signal its own virtue, and calling it an example of “inclusivity” — which is to say, companies and stores that maintain male-female bathrooms are guilty of exclusivity. Monsterbigots, in other words. See how that works?

It’s kind of astonishing, actually, how quickly what was considered unspeakably radical the day before yesterday becomes normalized the next day, and today, any opposition to it is treated as if it could only come from irrational animus. The Law of Merited Impossibility is getting to be as uncontestable as Newton’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The LMI is defined thus:

The Law Of Merited Impossibility is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and LGBT civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that traditional Christians and other conservatives will suffer a single thing from the expansion of LGBT rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”

Here’s a good example, from today’s headlines. If I told you as recently as a year or two ago that people were about to start gender transitions in kindergartners, and that any objection to this would be seen as cruel bigotry, you would have thought me an alarmist. Well, look at this piece from ThinkProgress, titled, “It Takes A Village To Bully A Transgender Kindergartner.” Excerpt:

When Dave and Hannah Edwards were lucky enough to win the lottery to enroll their child at Nova Classical Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota, they were excited about the charter school’s small classrooms, the kind teacher they’d met, and the special attention their kid would receive. What they didn’t anticipate was an entire community rising up against their family as they became the latest victims of an anti-transgender backlash sweeping the country.

Over the course of the school year, the kindergartner would transition from a gender non-conforming boy to a transgender girl. At every step of the way, the Edwards sought accommodation from Nova to help protect her from bullying and make sure her classmates understood who she was, and at every step of the way, a growing force of anti-transgender parents shut them down, creating a public spectacle and only increasing the harassment their daughter experienced.

The Edwards have since pulled their daughter from the charter school and enrolled her in a different public school where she is a happy and healthy little girl. But they have also filed a complaint against Nova for the way she was treated in hopes of protecting other trans kids from enduring the same treatment. “Now that we’ve had to move and now that we’ve had this potential harm that’s been inflicted on our family,” Dave told ThinkProgress, “we’re invested in making sure this doesn’t happen to any kid again.”

Let me state up front that bullying is wrong and should not ever be acceptable, full stop. But read on, and see if this is merely a case of bullying — and see who was bullying whom. Halfway through kindergarten year, the Edwards child began to identify as female:

Classmates would make fun of her for her shoes, backpack, or other preferences that were more associated with girls than with boys. The Edwards, both teachers themselves, approached Nova to discuss ways to minimize that bullying. “We came from a place of both being educators and really believing in children having the educational tools and language to talk about things and how that might make a difference.” Hannah explained. “Kids, when they’re given the opportunity, can really learn and grow and they want to be good people.”

Their first impression was that the school was on the same page. In fact, administrators agreed to incorporate the book My Princess Boy into an anti-bullying lesson about gender diversity. But when they emailed the school community on October 14th to inform them of this lesson, the backlash began. “Once parents knew, things changed completely,” Dave said.

Behold, the voice of the savage mob:

Just because the student deserves to be safe and respected, wrote parent Vince West in October, “that does not mean, nor does the law imply, that we have to celebrate gender non-conformism (or any controversial moral difference) in school (or anywhere).”

“Given the current climate at Nova, we are opting our children out of any teaching that goes against the natural order of gender identity on the 16th and any other teaching on this topic on some future date,” wrote parent David Bursey. “We all have differences. We recognize them and respect them but we don’t need to call attention to them and celebrate them as a school.” In another email, he explicitly opposed allowing transgender students access to bathrooms and sports teams that match their gender, adding that he even thinks respecting their preferred names and pronouns “is treading on murky territory.”

The debate grew really heated, but the Edwardses could not discern between truly abusive, out-of-bounds commentary and simply objecting to what they want and believe:

Hannah’s sense was that the school was “trying to please this other side so they felt like they were heard, because they thought it was important to bring the community along with us by letting them speak their minds, but it just ended up being unsafe for my child because they were allowing this discriminatory discourse to happen.”

Got it? If you disagree with them, and speak your mind, then you are guilty of making a school unsafe for a child because of your “discriminatory discourse.” More:

After the Edwards’ daughter socially transitioned, they sought more education from the school so that students could better respect and appreciate her as their classmate. The complaint explains that these requests were summarily dismissed in a February 29th meeting:

We were told that the school was not willing to use effective materials like I Am Jazz; would not ever conduct gender education, whether proactive or corrective, without first introducing delay and inviting or encouraging families to “opt out”; and would not even — as a bare minimum — simply inform our child’s classmates of her preferred name and pronouns, without first delaying for days and inviting or encouraging families to “opt out” of this information.

And so, one set of parents of one confused child get to overrule the convictions and wishes of most other parents, and feel entitled to dictate the curriculum to other elementary school students. And if anybody resists, well, they’re haters and bullies.

Nova is a classical school, and one whose core principles include a “strong school-family partnership.” The Edwardses and their supporters frame this as the administration leaving decisions up to the mob, when in fact they are trying to honor their own principles. The Edwardses believe that they should dictate to the school and the school community how to think and how to run the charter school that they chose for their son/daughter.

The bathroom wars are entirely connected to this greater debate. It’s not really about where people get to pee, but something far more fundamental — and it’s a wonder that it eludes someone as intelligent as Krauthammer. It’s about reality and identity.

No wonder journalists are noticing that this is a significant time. But most are still missing what’s most important: while today’s conversations push the boundaries of how we understand gender, they don’t understand that this brave new world of identity is about more than gender.

The students with whom I associate—from middle school to college students—have understood for several years that we now reside in a world beyond gender. The youngest of them probably don’t realize that TIME’s article announced anything “new.”

For many of them, gender discussions, even of the transgender variation, are just so yesterday. When we talk about personal identity, we don’t include the mundane questions about being male and/or female. A person can certainly identify as male or female if they wish, but there is little expectation that one would do so.

After all, today Facebook gives us over 50 “gender” identities to choose from. (Conversations about this can involve questions about why there are so few options.) And rather than looking to gender or variations on a gender, more and more young people are seeking to discover their identity by widening the options to include “otherkins” (people who consider themselves to have a non-human identity, such as various animals, spirits, mediums, and so on).

Young people today are much less binary when it comes to understanding identity because “male” and “female” as categories don’t express a unique or comprehensive identity.

When I tell this to many adult audiences, they laugh, believing that young people will grow out of this “stage.” They’re surprised that I don’t share their sense of the immaturity of our youth.

That’s because the young people with whom I interact are extraordinarily perceptive, compared to adults. As one high school student recently asked me, “Why does our school demand that we figure out if we are male or female or some variation? How could we figure it out even if we cared about gender? Can you tell me what it feels like to be woman? Can you tell me what it feels like to be a man? Of course not. No one knows.”

Precisely.

More:

We don’t live at a tipping point; we already live beyond the tipping point. Whether adults realize it or not, the most important conversation today is not about gender, but about identity, as released from the confines of gender.

We have entered an era of liquid identity. One’s chosen title may express something, nothing, anything, or everything—but as a result, all these designations lose meaning, rather than gain it.

Again: this is about reality. Charles Krauthammer simply does not understand what is going on — and he’s not the only one. And even though Dr. Krauthammer and others think this is about nothing more than arguing how many transgenders can pee in the head, these ideas have consequences, these ideas have far-reaching ramifications. As I wrote earlier:

Kuehne, I should say, thinks this is a very bad thing, because it is part — indeed, perhaps the end point — of the total deconstruction of the relational bases of society and its refashioning to serve the needs of the sovereign Self. (His book about the Sexual Revolution and identity is here.)

… [This is] also a frontal challenge to the natural order, and beyond that, it’s a metaphysical challenge. Is reality nothing more than what we choose to call it? Does the Self have the power to re-order reality to suit its desires — and, in our deracinated culture, does it have the power to compel others to live by its illusions at the risk of being denounced as bigots, or even sued?

I notice this morning that TAC publishes a rave review of The Crisis of Modernityby the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, translated by our own Carlo Lancellotti. In the book, Del Noce recognizes the Sexual Revolution as primarily a metaphysical one intended to destroy the basis for traditional morality. In an essay first published in 1970, Del Noce wrote:

Indeed, [Wilhelm] Reich’s thought is based on the premise, which of course is taken as unquestionably true without even a hint of a proof, that there is no order of ends, no meta-empirical authority of values. Any trace not just of Christianity but of “idealism” in the broadest sense, or of a foundation of values in some objective reality, like history according to Marx, is eliminated. What is man reduced to, then, if not to a bundle of physical needs? …

Having taken away every order of ends and eliminated every authority of values, all that is left is vital energy, which can be identified with sexuality, as was already claimed in ancient times and it actually difficult to refute. Hence, the core element of life will be sexual happiness. And since full sexual satisfaction is possible, happiness is within reach.

More Del Noce:

The idea of indissoluble monogamous marriage and other ideas related to it (modesty, purity, continence) are linked to the idea of tradition, which in turn presupposes (since tradere means to hand down) the idea of an objective order or unchangeable and permanent truths (the Platonic True in itself and Good in itself). On top of everything else, the affirmation of these themes is one of the glories of Italian thought, because what else is Dante’s Comedyif not the poem of order viewed as the immanent form of the universe? …

Interesting. In the Commedia, the Inferno is where individual souls are trapped for eternity, isolated from communion with each other, in worlds they fashioned for themselves, because they preferred their own “truth” to the objective truth of the divine order. Del Noce:

But if we separate the idea of tradition from that of an objective order, it must necessarily appear to be “the past,” what has been “surpassed,” “the dead trying to suffocate the living,” what must be negated in order to find psychological balance. The idea of indissoluble marriage must be replaced by that of free union, renewable of breakable at any time. It does not make sense to speak of sexual perversions; on the contrary, homosexual expressions, either masculine or feminine, should be regarded as the purest form of love. …

Sexual liberation, as Del Noce saw, is based on the denial of metaphysics — that is, the denial of the claim that there is an immanent order in the world. Del Noce said traditionalists can’t even have a dialogue with the sexual liberationists because they deny the very foundation of tradition: belief in an unseen order.

The normalization of transgenderism requires the denial that gender and gender difference have essential meaning. It requires us to believe that truth is whatever the willing individual wishes it to be. And it greases the slippery slope to the loss of our very humanity. Ever heard of species dysphoria? You will.

It’s anarchy, and it can’t last. There will be an immense amount of destruction before this passes, and the natural order reasserts itself. Point is, the craziness in these two stories I posted at the top of this blog are hilarious, in a way, but deep down, not funny at all. The profound disorder within those people is, and is becoming, valorized by our culture, a political act that is undermining the basis of political and social life.

Do not let the Krauthammers dismiss your concerns, and don’t let the progressivist bullies make you think that you are insane or wicked for having them. There’s a very great deal at stake here. We are talking about the disintegration of the Western mind. Camille Paglia says, of today’s college students:

They have no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilisations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell. If you’ve had no exposure to that, you can honestly believe that ‘There is progress all around us and we are moving to an ideal state of culture, where we all hold hands and everyone is accepted for what they are … and the environment will be pure…’ – a magical utopian view that we are marching to perfection. And the sign of this progress is toleration – of the educated class – for homosexuality, or for changing gender, or whatever.

To me it’s a sign of the opposite, it’s symptomatic of a civilisation just before it falls: ‘we’ are very tolerant, not passionate, but there are bands of vandals and destroyers circling around the edge of our civilisation who will bring it down.

Whole interview here:

UPDATE: Isidore the Farmer speaks truth:

One thing this is demonstrating is that the activism of the LGBT movement is about much more than what people do in the privacy of their homes.

An assurance given in recent years regarding gay marriage is that nothing being pursued actually impacts anyone else. Now, this was always a lie (whether they were also deceiving themselves I’m not sure – that may vary from activist to activist, citizen to citizen). And the Trans Offensive of 2015/2016 is demonstrating this perfectly, because it actually is having an impact on how people, in public settings: schools, locker rooms, restrooms. And, it is impacting children and adults alike.

While it is true that this is only a very small percentage of the population, it is increasingly obvious that this small percentage is seeking to impact the public interactions of all of society.

It never was about the privacy of one’s bedroom. It was always about coercing everyone to affirm their behavior, in public. However, the goal posts have now shifted enough that the LGBT activists and their supporters no longer really deny it, as even many commenters on this forum would have as recently as 18 months ago.

This. This is the key to understanding this entire thing. Whatever is demanded today will not be enough. There will always be more demanded, and the assurances that it will only go this far, no further, are worthless. Reason has nothing to do with this. It’s entirely about power. You will learn this now, or you will learn this later, but you will be made to learn it.

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243 Responses to Metaphysics Of The Men’s Room

“I think you have something to learn about biology and the birds and the bees if you think women can get pregnant by viewing a penis. ”

Sexual assault doesn’t begin and end with penetration. The consensus view, up until yesterday, was that exposing genitals unwanted to someone with opposite genitals was unacceptable. I am glad to hear that you disapprove of women being expected to share locker rooms with those who have opposite genitals. However, if you have paid close attention to the battles over locker room access recently in the news, you will surely have noticed that unfettered access to locker rooms is what is being demanded, and what the current interpretation of Title IX is forcing. Women who are told they must be willing to view unclothed people of the opposite anatomy as the price of entering their own locker rooms are not truly giving consent. Your cheerful new metaphysical plan for the world suggests to me that you don’t realise how significant such a change really is for women.

“many see this life-force as having a transcendent origin, and an immanent presence in every individual, and the world itself. Trying to get Christian metaphysicians or others of the western bent to recognize this is not really the point. Leaving such people in the dust as the culture mows them down is the point. No one is waiting around for the old curators of the transcendent to give their approval.”

You realize, don’t you, that you’re positing a world in which the law of non-contradiction doesn’t apply? In practice however, being an inescapable principle, it will apply, but only where the enlightened elites determine that it will apply.

And that brings us right back to the will-to-power.

It’s telling too that this new metaphysics applies only to the human sexual drive, and not the others. Besides the inherent irrationalism of this move (as C.S. Lewis once suggested, apply the same logic to the human drive of hunger and see what you get), there is the realization of the elites that sexual “freedom” is a powerful tool for political control.

Hence, as this approach to sexuality progresses, what we are likely to see is not a state where everyone is happy and joyful and free to copulate with whomever one desires, but rather a more-or-less anarchic situation where sexual freedom is combined with rampant surveillance. You’ll be “free” in the bedroom, so to speak, but watched everywhere else.

This is already happening in Europe, by the way. I read somewhere recently that there are currently more surveillance cameras in the city of London than there are in the entire state of California.

What is, of course, most obvious about this “life force” is that it is ultimately impersonal; it makes no demands, has no expectations, requires no specific behaviors. It’s the perfect “god” for self-centered moderns, who tolerate no restrictions.

@a commenter, I wholly endorse this: “Women who are told they must be willing to view unclothed people of the opposite anatomy as the price of entering their own locker rooms are not truly giving consent. Your cheerful new metaphysical plan for the world suggests to me that you don’t realise how significant such a change really is for women.”

It seems there’s a bigger picture story behind all this. If view from a wider perspective of all the challenged norms one can begin to perceive it. It’s the post-modern attack on everything with the goal of breaking down society to the point that, having self-stripped ourselves of norms and even the ability to form societal norms we have to find a savior of some kind to put some sanity and safety back into society. There steps in government, the welcome totalitarian. It’s not about who pees where. That’s another of those Trojan horses for a bigger purpose.

“No doubt. But my question is: where is the shared conception of the Good in the West?”

Is the Good of the West a better or a worse Good than the Good in the East?

If we have several “Good”s, all with capital G, how can Giuseppe Scalas be sure he knows the true Truth? Perhaps he only knows a regional Truth, one less true than other Truths

Oakinhou,

Your comments reflects a belief – which is radically postmodern in its popularity, even though it is the logical consequence of Cartesianism – that the Good cannot rationally be known. I reject this position, because accepting it would mean rejecting the fundamental nature of human beings as rational animals.

So there are no regional “Goods”.

But the point is a different one. Whithout a shared conception of the Good, societal cohesiveness is seriously threatened. My point is that the West has lost such shared conception. Even worst, Western Countries have each lost, to more or less severe degrees, such a shared conception.

But phenomena such as black holes have actually been detected with instruments, have they not? It’s not like an astronomer just said “black holes are out there, trust me on that.” ….If you want to say, “no, it’s way more complex than that” then fine, how do we separate objective fact from subjective fancy? How do we independently confirm that a man is actually not a man at all, but a woman born with a man’s body in the same scientific way that we confirm the existence of black holes?

Well, yes, they did say “black holes are out there” long before anyone saw one. LaPlace pointed to the logical possibility way back in the 1790s, and Einstein posited their existence as part of his general theory of relativity in 1915. It was more than 50 years after that before the first detection of what seemed to be an actual black hole.

So I would expect something similar with whatever particular claims about transgenderism we’re talking about. Some I think are already proven, like the fact of some babies being born with mixed sex characteristics. Others may be proven through further developments in genetics, brain imaging and so on. That may take decades, plus the development of technologies that are to gender formation what the Hubble Space Telescope is to black holes. Still other claims may just be fanciful speculation, as conservatives claim, and will never prove true.

My point was that at least some conservative traditionalists have chained themselves to a kind of defiant binarism that, admittedly, does describe most of what we observe about human sexes — but in elevating this to an alleged “metaphysical” principle, they’re doing what astrophysicists would have been doing if they had declared that Newton’s theories aren’t just useful so far as they go, but are perfect reflections of the Mind of God, and therefore there’s no need to consider anything beyond them so Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg and the rest can all go hang. That would have simplified things, yes, but also have been pretty stupid.

My objection to the Del Noce quote had little to do with Reich himself, but with the conclusion he came to that the Sexual Revolution was a rejection of metaphysics and mysticism and transcendence in favor of animalistic coupling. That was never Reich’s point of view about the life force, even back in the 1930s, and it was never true of the sexual revolution per se either. It was certainly a rejection of Christian metaphysical notions about sexuality and the life-force, but it brought back into play all sorts of pagan and eastern metaphysical notions and mysticisms, not in any terribly organized way, mind you, but it certainly was not a rejection of all metaphysical ideas about sex. Instead, it elevated sexual metaphysics to what it considered a higher and more true level than what Christianity had done with these. IF Del Noce was trying to prove that underlying the sexual revolution was some kind of Reichian-dominated philosophical viewpoint from the 1930s, he failed badly at understanding the subject matter. But failing to understand it was, I think, precisely his purpose, because then it allowed him to dismiss and condemn it with great ease. Of course, that also ensured the failure of that conservative movement, because it failed to understand what it is opposing.

You realize, don’t you, that you’re positing a world in which the law of non-contradiction doesn’t apply?

I’m not sure what you mean by this “law of non-contradiction.” Do you mean an assertion that can’t be proven or denied because it exists in the subjectivity of the claimant? But that has been with us for ages – well ever since the beginning of the Christian era, which is based on the inability to contradict the various claims of the NT and its adherents, that mere belief in their God gives eternal life and salvation. You can’t contradict that with any amount of outside evidence, just as you can’t contradict Caitlyn Jenner’s claim that ever since she was a child, she felt herself to be female, despite having a male’s body.

And that brings us right back to the will-to-power.

I’m not sure that you understand what the will-to-power is. It’s Neitzsche’s concept of how the weak and the sickly of both mind, body, and spirit take power over the strong. It’s morality as a social force, plain and simple. And it is his way of describing how Christianity came to power and dominated the healthier aspects of our character up until his time, producing what he considered to be a nihilistic culture that he thought was on the verge of catastrophic collapse.

It’s telling too that this new metaphysics applies only to the human sexual drive, and not the others.

I think it’s generally thought to apply to all our life-drives, not just sexuality, but everything else that gives life and that we can enjoy. Food included. Not as pure hedonism, but as an Epicurianism. Hence the rise of the foodies, of which our host seems not to be immune either.

I would also point out that there’s nothing irrational about this. Simply because it wishes to enjoy the many fruits of the life-force, does not mean that there’s something inherently unstable or self-destructive about it. Only that the way in which to relate to the life-force has to be learned over time, some sophistication has to be gleaned from it, lessons given and received. And some of those lessons are negative ones, about how not to do this.

Hence, as this approach to sexuality progresses, what we are likely to see is not a state where everyone is happy and joyful and free to copulate with whomever one desires, but rather a more-or-less anarchic situation where sexual freedom is combined with rampant surveillance.

That’s certainly the narrative many here are proposing. But to have that make sense, it is necessary to eliminate from the opposition any metaphysics or mysticism or subtler understanding than the victory of pure animal appetites without restriction. And that’s what irrational about this narrative. It requires that everyone ignore the actual metaphysics being cultivated far and wide through the culture, which is much more sophisticated and nuanced than that, and requiring of a higher understanding of how the life-force works in us. You can see this throughout the New Age spirituality, the Yoga movement, alternative music and alt-culure worlds, even just among the liberal elites who value marriage and fidelity and so on as values to be cultivated within a particular cohort of intelligentsia.Most of these people are not adherents to an anti-metaphysical marxist atheism. They are actually adherents of a pagan mysticism that is growing stronger by the year, and diversifying into thousands of different sects rather than congealing into a single “religion”. And that makes it both strong and very difficult to fight, because every critique that might apply to one branch of it won’t apply to another.

What is, of course, most obvious about this “life force” is that it is ultimately impersonal; it makes no demands, has no expectations, requires no specific behaviors. It’s the perfect “god” for self-centered moderns, who tolerate no restrictions.

I would disagree. One’s own relationship to the life-force is a very personal thing, perhaps the most personal thing there is. It isn’t mediated by beliefs and theologies, it’s something one experiences very directly in every moment. Hence the admonition to “got with one’s gut” or “follow one’s heart”. To a Christian who is supposed to follow a specific and demanding doctrine, that may sound superficial and even self-indulgent – and of course it can be – but it’s actually very difficult and demanding. The heart and the life-force make all kinds of demands on us, and tell us things we don’t want to hear, and asks us to do things we didn’t want to do. So it’s really not an easy path at all, as most people will tell you. It’s just that the “authority” one tries to grapple with isn’t an outside one, but an inner authority. It’s that “clear still voice” within that guides us.

That’s a much closer description of the metaphysics most people are moving with these days. It’s not actually as random and chaotic as it might seem. But I understand the need to see it that way.

Cloudbuster–the problem is when you start shoehorning in all sorts of stuff into gender and how boys should behave and how girls should behave.

I think that gender is far more fluid than a lot of people want to admit. And that the traditional pecking order between the sexes comes down to the fact that the average man can beat the average woman up. But no one wants to admit that, so people come up with explanations involving an apple and a talking snake.

This is the way the left message-compression and free-form equivocation start to trap us with their “soft truths”. It is true that a teenage XY may “identify” as a girl, what is not clear from this is that there is then a “bathroom of their gender”.

They know full well that the theory behind this is that, gender expression being varied, results in no clear expression behavior, and so they argue that society “makes up” gender stereotypes–and perhaps gender itself. But that would be like saying since there is no one way all Caucasians act, and no one shade of skin-tone, there is no facts behind being “Caucasian”, especially given the difficulty of figuring out the proportionality of race in a mixed-race individual.

But as I always like to point out, my race is accidental–in a volkisch sense, the mixture of the genes that go into me might have only been capable in the strains of DNA my ancestors had. There could be 4 more races, or 9 more races, or 50 more races on this planet, not affecting my particular mixture of genes which makes me. Still the mixture of genes and the variation of the races might in a genetic sense simply define the variation that is me.

Sexual reproduction and sexual reproductive functions are much more innate to our genotype. Race is a genotypic variation, we can’t even get to a genotype without our adaptation as sexual reproducers. Thus, sexual adaptation is actually more likely to be a real difference than race is.

Even so, while I do not find objectionable the idea that there is more in the pool than “male” and “female”, the function of sex makes everything outside of those two “roles”/adaptations less functional and more ad-hoc variation (or even incidental) than one’s role as a male reproducer and a female reproducer, and really of less likely real value to anybody else or the community as a whole.

And I think this post-gender idea is even a reaction to sexual compression–both against traditional society, but also against sex-utopians who basically propagate the idea central to your identity as an individual is which body part you want to run against another body part to achieve orgasm and all the various elements in the cycle of excitement.

Which is why, as typical, with the game of telephone that message-manipulators like to play, “otherkins” comes in as “gender”, this is simply slippage of a clearer idea by colloquial abuse.

When confronted with a straw man that people were forced to be either MEN or WOMEN, and given a couple new copulation styles to achieve the ultimate in individual expression (thrill and orgasm), kids, who might simply be unnerved or befuddled by the idea of sex–the way that some kids have doubtless always been–simply opt out of the scheme altogether, feeling that their “role” within the various copulation styles does not capture them as a person.

The answer to this is not yes, you need to find a name for your gender that captures everything you are as an individual, but to reject the entire premise that “gender” was ever meant to do just that by anyone with faculties.

Nonetheless, to get to the lie mentioned at the top, there is no room with a stick figure on the door that captures your ineffable qualities. Furthermore, the idea that gender itself, while not solidly defined, is “made up” is further more a case that we DON’T have a room for your individual expression of “gender”. As it is very likely that no chemical state in your body corresponds to something “made up by society”. That would ignore the connotation of the point of calling something “made up by society”.

Instead, it seems clear to me, gender theorists/crusaders use the fixation some of the opposite sex have with the social stereotype that the gender theorists complain is “unreal”, as leverage to counterfeit mainstream ideas and arrange them as “fair”.

However, one thing I can definitely be sure is “made up by society” is a manipulative lie that refutes itself, leveraged toward political supremacy. If gender is “fluid” then there IS NO “bathroom of their gender” because there are only two bathrooms. You might not comply with either stick figure, but what that doesn’t make is a correlation between you and the other one.

It’s fascinating to me that people keep trying to reduce humans into something by the process of “science” (the aggregate and statistical measurement of common conditions or regular events) and then want to be saved from callous reduction to a limited set which deprives us of our “human dignity”. It’s something that I, as a Christian–who nonetheless never shies from reductive material analysis–do not trap myself within, if the transcendent can be simply posited/believed or conviction reduced to error. I also don’t suffer the trap of excessive equality either. For if everything is said to be equal, then how can the proposition that everything is not equal–or that “equal” is a word equal to all other words–be less than equal to that proposition? And if I pronounce the two equal, for consistency’s sake, then I’ve said nothing.

“Your comments reflects a belief – which is radically postmodern in its popularity, even though it is the logical consequence of Cartesianism – that the Good cannot rationally be known. I reject this position, because accepting it would mean rejecting the fundamental nature of human beings as rational animals.”

I fully acknowledge that I don’t believe Good or Truth or other capital letter virtues can be rationally known. I can know good things, and can approximate towards the Good. But I cannot believe you can apprehend Good or Truth

If you can rationally know Good then you can fully explain it to every other rational person. Irrespective of the tradition and cultural background of that person.

However, the explanation cannot be “God inspired people some rules to write in a book and the rules are Good and whatever is not the rules in Not Good”.

Because other people have other books with other rules and claim that beheading infidels is indeed part of the Good.

If your argument is “I read this book and it feels true and good to me” then you have just thrown the rationality out of the window.

Based on things you probably don’t accept as basic tools, like harm, and care and consent, I believe I can identify things that are more or less good than others, forcing unwilling people is less good than convincing them, giving poor people food is more good than giving them stones (but there’s a book that suggested that throwing stones at certain people -mostly womem- was part of the Good, until the rule was subsequently changed).

But this for me is a piecemeal, bottom up process. I don’t know all of the Good in one sweeping act of rationality. I know good things in opposition to less good things and I try act accordingly, choosing more rather than less good as much as my lights allow me

Not to derail this fine article, but this process has been going on a while and has other dimensions that people have long ignored or dismissed as not important.

It is indeed about identity … but who controls identity.

One of them is the question of state sponsored withholding of identity w/r/t adoptees (and also persons conceived from sperm/egg banks). Such persons have long been told that their quest for ancestral identity is not important and the biological parental co-creator’s rights to secrecy are more important than the right of persons to have a full reckoning of their identity. This was a slippery slope on identity that was skated upon for a long, long time. The whole concept of a persons’ legitimacy (or lack thereof) w/r/t parentage hinged on secrecy and the State being complicit in withholding said identity.

This also ties in with the abortion issue where the so-called non-person’s rights are subordinated to the so-called person’s rights to snuff out the others life. If a person as an a born infant cannot access their parental information, it was only a short step from there to deny them even the right to life at all. After all, they are “undocumented” in the most basic sense and therefore are non-persons … even as adults … in the eyes of the law.

In short this question of identity is a huge one and very little explored. Mr. Dreher has made a big contribution towards filling that gap.

This is why arguments on metaphysics are essential and when we try to take shortcuts and just assume gender identity is plastic or not or argue back and forth we are caught in endless absurdity. I think this is a very minor issue in itself but if it stimulates a series of dialogues on metaphysical questions then it is a good thing. I disagree with the Western “traditionalists” though I have great sympathy for them. Modernism happened for a reason–that reason was that traditional religions and metaphysical frameworks no longer, as a practical matter, “worked.” People don’t have traditional views on race for a reason–white supremacy is absurd. People have reasons for regarding women as fully human unlike traditions in the West. People have a reason for not assigning homosexuality, that has always been around, to the closets and rest rooms. Traditions are over–you can’t go back and the cultural notions of Dreher make no sense other than in the creation of independent communities like he advocates in the Benedict Option. But that isn’t dialogue but maybe it will be dialogue enough so that when right wingers (and here in North Carolina they are not just “conservative” culturally but racist as well).

We can start by having a dialogue on religion and the tenets of those religions which more and more people realize are absurd in the notion that each of theme are the complete truth which is intellectually absurd.

The reason that we are front-loading “identity” is that an individual has at the very least, a right to be. Individuals don’t have unlimited rights, and claims to rights have to be processed by the system, but the essential right to be as you are cannot be overruled by the community of individuals who are what they are by being what they are.

So we’re simply seeing an escalation of “identity” to argue the basis from which, if society is to claim to treat you “equally” it must accept as an integral part of your person.

Thus if you are such a thing, society is exclusionary to the extent that they discourage “your type” or that they have in mind another type they would like to encourage.

And the incremental leverage by value-inflation is how the left operates. “You SAY you’re for people being equal under law!” but to “prove” it you have to be increasingly accepting as to what anybody wants to front-load as “identity”. Otherwise it’s just like slavery of Africans. As seen upstream in this thread the “mowing over” of people by a refusal of use of the preferred gender-stereotype room–which is as gender-blunt now as it ever was.

Is it any wonder we couldn’t expect equally proportion-less “analyses” from them like what goes into “zero-tolerance” laws, where chewing a pop-tart into the shape of a gun is considered in the same class as bringing a real gun to school?

Zero-tolerance means we are in fugue of discriminating one case from another that some possible sophist could argue is “like” another, and having debilitated ourselves on a steady diet of slop, we cannot answer. And yet, it asserts something just as narrow–and artificial–as what they eschew, that kids chewing pop-tarts into guns have invaded some made-up “safe space” of other kids.

The problem is is that both sides would have a problem with arguing that there are pop-tart-into-gun-chewing kids, who are being denied expression. The right because I might as well open up the sluice gates to drain off the sludge in my brain, the left because they want to control the identity stack.

Wouldn’t safe/unsafe be a non-evidential binary? Isn’t to some degree hostile/friendly? Isn’t fair/unfair?

It’s precisely the sophistry of the special-pleading nuance-ists: yes, gender is fluid, no simple phrase could possibly encapsulate the variation of being a living, breathing human being … (add fluff to taste) and that’s why you’re a HATER!!

It’s one of the problems I’ve always had with Nietzsche, particle-ization of one thing at the expense of crystallization of another. The only difference being that he did not use a feedback loop to see if he could equally tear down his new monolith.

A transgender undressing in a public facility isn’t committing assault. A penis is not an intrinsically offensive weapon. It might be morally offensive to some, even an affront to modesty and privacy and so on, but it isn’t a sex crime. Unless of course it is done in a lewd and lascivious manner. But certainly where transgenders are openly allowed to use dressing rooms, say at colleges under Title IX, it’s being done openly and with fair warning. Someone who takes advantage of that to engage in sexual assault is definitely committing sexual assault, and that’s criminal behavior. But I doubt most transgenders have anything remotely like that on their minds.

Nonetheless, I do agree with the general view that penises in women’s locker rooms are probably a bad idea altogether. Describing it as sexual assault just goes so far overboard as to give away the game here. But it is indeed an inconvenience for those women who feel so uncomfortable about transgender penises to have to forgo using locker rooms for the rare possibility of seeing one. Who knows, maybe the transgender penis really does have magical powers to impregnate from sight alone? So perhaps rather than having men’s and women’s locker rooms, we should have “penis” and “no-penis” locker rooms. That might resolve the gender problem. And provide some amusing signs for posting outside.

As others have pointed out, this probably isn’t necessary for bathrooms, as stalls make genital exposure a rare thing.

I fully acknowledge that I don’t believe Good…. I … can approximate towards the Good.

You might as well claim you can, by a compass, get somewhere in the vicinity of Never Neverland, which, I assume, neither you or I believe exists, and neither you or I believe you can get in the vicinity of a point that doesn’t actually exist.

What you mean is that you can–or believe you can–offer a system which would have the same psychological reaction (perhaps given time) as people call “good”. Since you don’t believe there is anything other than that going on with people who “believe in Good”.

What’s bad about this, though, is that an approximation , and a popular adoption is about the limit of what is offered, from a purely neutral perspective. Thus, it doesn’t really speak to the fine-tunedness of saying any world where we don’t allow people to pick their bathrooms, counter to popular perception, is definitively outside the system of “justice” for imperfect administration of equality.

You either approximate or you can finely tune, nobody has to slavishly follow your antennae divining a concept you have no idea exists, or whether that behavior can be optimized. Unfortunately, we exist within an authoritarian system that says that justice can be finely tuned and they are just the experts to do it, within a regular space of legal ethics–which ends up denying not only free exercise of the fundamental document but the “rights of conscience” on clause away in the presidential letter that they counterfeited. Nor do we get the effect of the wall which protects the rights of conscience, because instead we have a series of siege walls, that gradually encroach on the decision space of an individual.

Being piddled on and told that in somebody else’s expert opinion, it’s actually raining really isn’t anybody’s idea of a social compact, justice, or an approximation of Good. What that says is the established, ratified (equivocated) text of “rights” claims in this country cannot be optimized toward what it explicitly states, but we must accept the claim that it can be optimized by experts of what it states toward some other ideal end.

~~~I’m not sure what you mean by this “law of non-contradiction.” Do you mean an assertion that can’t be proven or denied because it exists in the subjectivity of the claimant?~~~

The LNC states that states that contradictory statements/ideas cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. Thus the idea that everyone can be their own professor of ethics is workable only in theory, as it rapidly falls apart when varying individualist ethics start bumping up against one another. A society, for example, cannot be simultaneously vegetarian and non-vegetarian. When conflicts like that occur someone has to arbitrate, and that arbitrator will have to acknowledge contradictions, even if each individual “professor” does not. Throw the LNC out the door and it inevitably comes back through the window.

“I’m not sure that you understand what the will-to-power is. It’s Neitzsche’s concept of how the weak and the sickly of both mind, body, and spirit take power over the strong. It’s morality as a social force, plain and simple.”

Right, but it also works on the opposite side, does it not? Nietzsche did not apply it only to the “moral.”

“I think it’s generally thought to apply to all our life-drives, not just sexuality, but everything else that gives life and that we can enjoy. Food included. Not as pure hedonism, but as an Epicurianism.”

Except that there exists nothing objective whereby to differentiate between hedonism and Epicureanism. By what standard do you call one man’s appetite Epicurean and another’s hedonistic?

~~~One’s own relationship to the life-force is a very personal thing, perhaps the most personal thing there is. It isn’t mediated by beliefs and theologies, it’s something one experiences very directly in every moment. Hence the admonition to “got with one’s gut” or “follow one’s heart”.~~~

But what do you do when one person’s “gut” or “heart” produces actions which conflict with another’s? Who decides who’s right? And on what basis? To use the example I mentioned above, why Mother Teresa and not Ayn Rand?

“It’s not actually as random and chaotic as it might seem.”

Actually it is, it’s just not recognizable as such because it’s not in power yet. Recall that the French Revolution was all peace and light — liberty, equality, fraternity — until the time came to start actually running the show. Then the guillotines were rolled out.

No, sorry, but this is all ultimately incoherent feel-goodism that refuses to examine its presuppositions. That it’s “winning” is not a mark in its favor, but rather a mark against modern man’s ability to think rationally. This may not be clear now, but it will be when the guillotines (real or symbolic) are rolled out again. When all you’ve got to base your ethics on are feelings and ego, the biggest ego with the least feelings will end up in charge.

“A penis is not an intrinsically offensive weapon. It might be morally offensive to some, even an affront to modesty and privacy and so on, but it isn’t a sex crime. Unless of course it is done in a lewd and lascivious manner.”

Where do you get this only in a “lewd and lascivious manner” BS from,Joys-R-Us?

(a)������ Unless the conduct is punishable under subsection (a1) of this section, any person who shall willfully expose the private parts of his or her person in any public place and in the presence of any other person or persons, except for those places designated for a public purpose where the same sex exposure is incidental to a permitted activity, or aids or abets in any such act, or who procures another to perform such act; or any person, who as owner, manager, lessee, director, promoter or agent, or in any other capacity knowingly hires, leases or permits the land, building, or premises of which he is owner, lessee or tenant, or over which he has control, to be used for purposes of any such act, shall be guilty of a Class 2 misdemeanor.

Thanks for clarifying what you mean by LNC. But we have a society that includes both meat eaters and vegetarians, not to mention vegans, fruitarians, foodies, fast food addicts, and you name it. We all manage to get along without killing one another over our differences. So merely having different morals and ethics and life practices doesn’t mean we can find no accommodation for one another in a pluralistic society. We don’t all have to be just one thing to get along. In fact, forcing everyone to fit into one or just a few accepted categories ends in violence. Pluralism, on the other hand, helps end violence. Where one person’s ethics butts up against another’s, we have the legislatures and the courts to help us decide the issues. Seems to be working fairly well, though it’s obviously not a paradise. But aren’t you somehow expecting paradise? Oh, maybe in the afterlife? Well, in this life, we generally have to compromise.

Nietzsche did not apply it only to the “moral.”

Yes, he pretty did only apply the will-to-power designation to morality. It’s not his general concept for people who are just jockeying for power in the usual ways. It’s for weak people who try to gain power by resort to morality. And in that sense, he did apply it to the “other side” of debates likes this, if by that you mean the morality of socialist-progressive politics. But in that case, his critique was that socialism had essentially kept the moral ethos of Christianity in place, and rather than dumping it altogether, they merely dumped their belief in God. The result, he felt, was an even worse example of will-to-power. He didn’t live long enough to see it, but the communism of the 20th century fulfilled his prophesy. And even the minor versions of it that we see floating around now, which assigns moral superiority to the victims of power, including even gays and the transgendered, would be examples of it. But so would all this precious Christian moralizing about the fall of civilization.

Except that there exists nothing objective whereby to differentiate between hedonism and Epicureanism. By what standard do you call one man’s appetite Epicurean and another’s hedonistic?

Isn’t it obvious? My pleasures are epicurean, and other people’s are hedonistic. I jest, but not by much. That’s what “objectivity” comes down to when morality is at stake. The game has gotten so old that virtually anyone can try to claim the high ground by pointing to their “victimhood”, regardless of the objective facts. And as soon as they become victims with power, they turn and use that power to create other victims. I think people are beginning to see through that, however. Which is good, in that it’s helping us get some distance from the moral arguments that are little more than propaganda wars between unethical characters.

But what do you do when one person’s “gut” or “heart” produces actions which conflict with another’s? Who decides who’s right?

Well, obviously a conversation is in order then. And failing that, a lawsuit, or legislation, etc. There are many situations where everyone wins, but there are certainly a few where everyone loses. It’s far from a perfect system. But it’s one that works reasonably well. It’s called having a civil society.

And on what basis? To use the example I mentioned above, why Mother Teresa and not Ayn Rand?

Of what concern is that other than to the fans of Rand and MT? People can have their various heroes and villains, we don’t have to all agree on the ratings.

Actually it is, it’s just not recognizable as such because it’s not in power yet.

But it is in power, and things are going relatively well. SSM is the law of the land, and the earth has not swallowed us all up.

Recall that the French Revolution was all peace and light — liberty, equality, fraternity — until the time came to start actually running the show. Then the guillotines were rolled out.

The guillotines are in your imagination, my friend. Just like your belief in God and Kaitlyn Jenner’s gender. Not that I’m putting down the imagination. I think it’s God-given. But heads will not literally roll over this.

No, sorry, but this is all ultimately incoherent feel-goodism that refuses to examine its presuppositions.

That’s an irrational assertion that contradicts itself at the core. What on earth is irrational about feeling good? It’s probably the most rational motivation on earth, to feel good rather than bad, to do the things that make us feel good rather than bad, to arrange our society such that people feel the most aggregate good rather than bad. No, what’s irrational is ordering society in such a way as to try to promote some kind of imaginary fealty to an imagined order put in place by an imagined God that ends up creating more bad feelings than good feelings. That’s an incredibly irrational way to try to live.

Now I’m not suggesting that creating a culture in which people feel good is either easy or free of any sacrifice or temporary difficulty. Everyone knows you have to work pretty darned hard in this world if you actually want to feel good with some regularity. But at least one who is pursing that end is operating by a rational desire, and if they are actually achieving the desired results, their methods are also quite rational. That’s how it works. Suffering is not something a rational person pursues as if it has some intrinsic value other than showing us what not to do.
That it’s “winning” is not a mark in its favor, but rather a mark against modern man’s ability to think rationally. This may not be clear now, but it will be when the guillotines (real or symbolic) are rolled out again. When all you’ve got to base your ethics on are feelings and ego, the biggest ego with the least feelings will end up in charge.

messed up the last paragraph of my post, which should be a quote of yours:

When all you’ve got to base your ethics on are feelings and ego, the biggest ego with the least feelings will end up in charge.

That’s not all we have to base our ethics on, but it’s certainly the most important part of it. Love, after all, is something we feel. Empathy is the ability to feel what others feel, and to act accordingly. Without these, how can you possibly even be a good Christian? And saccharine as it might sound, most people really do value the feeling of love above most everything else. That’s what people say makes them feel good. You don’t have to be a Christian to have such values. And likewise, most people recognize that being a selfish ass doesn’t actually feel good. Even self-indulgence doesn’t feel good past a certain point. Hurting other people by sticking their heads in guillotines doesn’t make people feel good either. So instead of telling everyone what future victims you’re going to be, why not remind them that feeling good requires that others feel good also, even one’s opposition. That everyone be taken into account. People can relate to that sort of appeal, if you can humble yourself enough to make it.

Orwell explained how the SJWs think in 1984. Here is the O’Brien explaining what is happening and why to Winston:

‘There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

‘And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands — all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.’

I’m not a lawyer, but I would gather that the “exceptions” cited in the code would include a public changing room in which it is known that by public policy both men and women, or if you prefer “people with penises and people without penises” will be occasionally naked and within view of others in that changing room.

@ Joys-R-Us you seem to miss the point, and evade the issue with the dodge of “a penis is not an intrinsically offensive weapon”. Not a few natal males get their jollies from merely exposing girls to their “un-weaponized” penis. Women know this – and police logs affirm this. To suggest that only transwomen will be using the women’s lavatory and no males with questionable motives will take advantage of the new law to gain access is plain naive, or perhaps one of the benefits of not having to exercise caution around males in general (something women practice on a regular basis). Exposure is not the only issue with natal males in the bathroom — men are more likely to have paraphilias (including some that result in taping women from under the adjacent stall, or taking upstart shots). Men also commit the majority of sex crimes. Re-directing the discussion to ‘transwomen aren’t a problem’ misses what is actually being said – it’s not transwomen that worry me. (Though on that matter, even lab animals react differently to male and female lab workers.) Surely, however, if you are confidant that exposure is not considered a problem unless it is done in a lewd and lascivious manner, try encouraging a natal male to drop his pants in public in a public setting whilst looking friendly.

[NFR: History will record this date as the one on which the phrase “unweaponized penis” appeared on my blog. Thank you. — RD]

The man was arrested April 23, after Target’s new policy had passed, for filming a woman while she tried on bathing suits in the women’s dressing room. Now, this guy has been arrested before (last time he was filming an 11-year-old girl). But now he doesn’t even have to sneak into the women’s bathrooms or dressing rooms, or worry that someone will call the cops just because he’s in there. He can just go right in. He can wait a while, and pretend to try on clothes. And, sure, he was arrested, so no harm, right? If his victim is a little annoyed that he filmed her undressed without her knowledge, well, she’s just going to have to get over herself–it’s not like she was actually hurt, or anything… (/sarc., if anybody wasn’t sure).

Correction: after double-checking the source it seems that this crime happened *last* April, a year before Target changed its policy. I wonder if Mr. Foerstel knows how easy it will be for him to try this crime again, once he’s a free man?

ANY person, INCLUDING but not limited to a transgender, undressing in a public facility is committing assault.

Why? Because the overwhelming majority of people in our culture, polity, society, respond to indecent exposure AS assault, and we have legislated accordingly.

I have sometimes speculated about, what if human culture had developed essentially without clothes, with no mores about exposure, used to seeing each other naked most of the time, and thinking nothing of it.

In that case, obviously, exposure would not be a form of assault. Further, there would be no such thing as cross-dressing, and there might be little or nothing of “trans-gender,” since everyone could see at a glance what sex you ARE. It would also mean that there would be no issue about a trans-gender exposing themselves, because, everyone is exposed all the time, anyway.

Some laws are a simple matter of, most of us don’t want to see it, so keep it tucked away or we will prosecute you for it. The fact that you don’t see anything wrong with it is irrelevant.

You can have a private club or a designated nude beach if you want to indulge that sort of thing.

Examining Erin Manning’s Five Steps, I would note that the logical outcome is that women should carry loaded pistols in their purses whenever they enter a restroom or locker room. An armed transgender society is a polite transgender society.

Carlo, trying to chart the evolution of Reich’s particular brand of mystical metaphysics really doesn’t much matter to this discussion.

Although joysrus has offered a pile of equally irrelevant speculative psychology, I certainly agree with this statement. We don’t need Freud, Reich, Jung, or any other speculative nonsense to resolve what is really a rather simple issue.

“I’m not a lawyer, but I would gather that the “exceptions” cited in the code would include a public changing room in which it is known that by public policy both men and women, or if you prefer “people with penises and people without penises” will be occasionally naked and within view of others in that changing room.”

You were attempting to make people think that it is only a crime if done in a “lewd and lascivious manner.” That is a lie. They are breaking the Indecent Exposure law. The law clearly states, “except for those places designated for a public purpose where the same sex exposure is incidental to a permitted activity”. EXCEPT FOR SAME SEX EXPOSURE.

The only other “exceptions” cited in the code are for women breastfeeding and for sexually orientated businesses like topless bars. Like you, I’m not a lawyer either. But you don’t have to be a lawyer to understand that the law clearly states that the law would be broken. You only have to be a lawyer to twist the law around to get your client off, much in the same as you twist reality around to serve your purpose. You’d make a great lawyer.

Anna, it’s hard to continue in this manner with a straight face, but I’ll try. I’m sure that regardless of the law, there will be men who will expose themselves to women to get their jollies off, even though that’s already against the law. But that already is going on. I seriously doubt changing the law is going to increase the numbers of such incidents however. If it does, then adjustments will have to be made. The fact will remain that those who abuse the law to conduct themselves in a lewd and lascivious manner will be breaking the law. I assume this sort of thing already goes on in some locker rooms anyway, even though they are gender-segregated. Complaints will be filed, investigations launched, perhaps even arrests and prosecutions to follow.

Your analogy simply doesn’t work, in that dropping one’s pants in a truly public setting, where people aren’t expected to be changing their clothes and walking around naked, is already against the law, regardless of the genders involved. A locker room, however, is by definition a place where naked people are expected to be seen. So it’s a very different situation. It’s certainly an inconvenience and even an uncomfortable situation for some people, and so I think everyone needs to be accomodated in some manner or other. But to suggest that there’s something intrinsically “weaponized” about a naked penis, erect or not-erect, in a locker room is singularly absurd, because that’s a place where people are expected to be seen naked. It’s just something that some women don’t want to see, even in a transgendered woman. And with minors involved, it does get a bit dicier. So perhaps an area with a curtain could do the trick. These are not necessarily intractable problems.

“So instead of telling everyone what future victims you’re going to be, why not remind them that feeling good requires that others feel good also, even one’s opposition. That everyone be taken into account. People can relate to that sort of appeal, if you can humble yourself enough to make it.”

But can’t you see that this is all bosh? Everyone can’t be “taken into account” because A) not all contradictory views can be harmonized, and more importantly B) there are bad people, many of which could not care less about “harmony.” By what standard do you declare harmony a good, other than your own ipse dixit? And why is the opponent’s ipse dixit any less valid than yours?

Junior, I really don’t know how the law would treat this, but I would seriously doubt that a transgendered female with a penis could be prosecuted for exposing said penis in a locker room openly mandated by federal law to allow its use by transgendered people. But maybe someone else more familiar with how the legal system deals with these things could weigh in. Perhaps a very nimble lawyer would argue that since it’s a female penis, the law has not been violated. I’d love to hear the arguments in any case.

There are a number of public facilities in which men and women do get naked within view of one another, including spas and nude beaches, and I don’t think they get prosecuted for it. I’ve been to a number of public hot springs in park areas where that happens daily for years on end. So there are more exceptions than you are giving credit for.

But can’t you see that this is all bosh? Everyone can’t be “taken into account” because A) not all contradictory views can be harmonized, and more importantly B) there are bad people, many of which could not care less about “harmony.”

Quite true, but I thought it was the progressives who were aiming at a Utopia. Now you are demanding one. Please, make up your mind. The fact that perfect solutions can’t be had doesn’t mean that workable day to day solutions can’t be found that may not satisfy everyone, but don’t do grevious harm either.

As for bad people, they will of course always be with us, in the presence or absence of laws about transgenders. One commentator on one of these threads got hysterical about a man using these laws to take pictures of naked women, and then found out that the incident happened last year, before any of these regulations came about. Which merely shows that bad people don’t care about laws, and will violate them with impunity. You can’t create a perfectly safe Utopia, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to reach a reasonable compromise among decent people. Those who break that, should indeed be prosecuted. And no, you will never catch them all or prevent violations like that. It’s just how the world is.

By what standard do you declare harmony a good, other than your own ipse dixit? And why is the opponent’s ipse dixit any less valid than yours?

I didn’t say that harmony is some sort of absolute good. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, and not everyone sees harmony the same way. I’m merely arguing that in a pluralistic society we have to allow for many different views on the matter, and still try to be tolerant and accepting of our differences. SJWs could be a lot more tolerant and accepting too, so I’m not just preaching to the traditionalists.

No, “Joys,” I didn’t get “hysterical.” I thought the incident was recent and immediately made the correction (with a note to myself to be more careful with articles from a particular FB friend in future). Most of us have had this experience.

But what I did say, and what I still say, was that if a pervert could sneak into a women’s changing room in Target in 2015 and easily film a woman who was undressing to the degree necessary to try on bathing suits, that same pervert (or similar ones) in 2016 doesn’t even have to sneak in. He can stand outside the women’s dressing room at Target, wait for attractive women or girls to enter with lingerie or bathing suits to try on, and follow them so as to be sure of getting that optimal booth right next to theirs. Then he can get out his camera equipment and do what he’s already been arrested for doing without anybody daring to say a word about the fact that there’s a male in the women’s dressing room. Target has made it almost unbelievably easy for him, and for his ilk, to prey on women.

Now: I have a feeling (correct me if I’m wrong) that you don’t think a man filming women (or children–one of his victims was an 11-year-old girl) as they undress and try on clothes is a big deal. It’s not a physical assault, after all. If women can get used to being exposed to “female” penises, surely women can get used to being exposed to “female” digisexuals who identify as people who have deep-seated needs to film anonymous strangers in dressing rooms, right? I can imagine future arguments that insist that if a woman goes into a dressing room to try on clothes, she’s already giving tacit consent to being filmed (just as you’ve been arguing today that a woman who uses women’s dressing rooms or locker rooms has tacitly agreed to the occasional sight of a “female” penis). Why, we can make sure that all women are perfectly safe just by redefining things like “harm” and “crime.”

Or: we could agree that people with penises don’t belong in women’s private areas in the first place. But that’s too dangerously like common sense to get anywhere with progressives.

Erin, given your presumption that I must think it’s okay for someone to film women undressing without their knowledge is just fine and dandy (how that follows from any of my arguments simply makes no sense), I think my impression that your reaction to this story was hysterical is quite apt. And also hysterically funny. Your inability to reason through these various analogies is simply hilarious, and not worth refuting, if you can’t see through them yourself.

I don’t see anything about the proposed legislations or regulations or whatever rules they are proposing for transgenders using women’s dressing rooms that would allow them to film the proceedings. That’s still illegal. And so it doesn’t make it any “easier” to do that.

Not that either of us would really know how to conduct such an operation, but it would certainly require a lot of subterfuge. And someone desperate enough to commit to that much subterfuge apparently doesn’t even need transgender access, as we can already see. I would gather that it’s done by men dressing up as women and not being noticed. I don’t see how the transgender thing would make that any easier. In fact, if they called attention to themselves in that manner, it would probably blow their operation. It’s not like transgenders would suddenly have a license to just whip out a camera and start filming. That would immediately arouse a lot of protest, and claiming to be transgender wouldn’t stop that.

I suppose this discussion does make it clear how much of our lives relies on a certain amount of trust, and that people can rather easily violate that trust. But that isn’t going to change one way or another by outlawing transgenders from changing rooms. As long as they don’t fully expose themselves, all sorts of men can gain access to these areas if they are so determined. And apparently some do.

btw, I’m already on record here as not being militant about transgenders with penises having full access to such changing rooms. I even suggested they change the name form “men’s and women’s locker rooms” to “penis and no-penis locker rooms” if that’s what it comes down to. There are many compromises, such as a curtained off area, etc. Reasonable accomodations. But hysterical talk about film crews in the locker rooms and weaponized and unweaponized penises does not help the discussion, in my view.

I’m probably not the first to suggest this, but another way to vet the process is to require a doctor’s certification for transgendered women with penises to use a female restroom or locker room. This would go a long way towards eliminating casual interlopers.

The American College of Pediatrics have made a collective statement on the transitioning of children. The first is over 80% of children end up growing out of their gender dysphoria, secondly those that do transitioning activity have a suicide rate 20x the national average besides many or most horribly regretting the decisions that they’ve made.
That’s why the the College of Pediatrics collectively equate parents who who facilitate the process of transition of their children’s natural born sexuality to the other as a form of child abuse. Wake up, gender dysphoria is a form of mental illness most children grow out of, if they had anorexia would you encourage a diet, knock it off.